When the UK's defense contractor for the Navy decided to standardize on Windows, it "prompted strong internal opposition from some , who had a sound background in Unix and who had, despite resource starvation and a companywide policy to standardise on Windows, been investigating open source alternatives as a foundation for future combat systems. They lost."

Ask some end users what Linux Standard Base (LSB) is and most likely they either won't know anything about it, or know a little bit but not enough to qualify as understanding what all the buzz around LSB is about. Ask three ISVs and only one will likely understand the implications of LSB for their business. And only a very, very few will say that they have started the process of making some of their applications LSB-compliant. Read More.

FreeBSD has released a new Beta of 5.3. Release notes can be viewed at here.

With Microsoft's release of Virtual PC 7.0 to manufacturing this week, several sources close to the Redmond-based software giant were able to obtain finalized copies of the product. A collection of screenshots from the soon-to-be released emulation software package are included in an exclusive AppleInsider photo gallery.

Athene is a desktop system for Linux that uses its own graphics drivers for high speed access to your graphics card. On version 4.1, resolution and display management functionality were improved. File and folder security information were added to the file manager. New hot-keys such as alt-tab window focusing were added. Dead-key support for international keyboards was added. Some bugs have also been fixed.

Linux began as a labor of love by hippies and hackers. Now the suits are cutting checks and running the show. This pay-for-play arrangement may be standard operating procedure among high-tech companies and academic labs, but it represents a big change for Linux, which first gained favor among hippie-esque programmers who disdained revenue and profit, advocating a "peace, love and software" vision of Linux as a free operating system developed without regard for corporate interests.

This Fall the widget wars will move into high gear. The battle for the desktop is about to begin. And with Longhorn's XAML technology lurking in the distance (and Apple's Dashboard), widgets are likely to deliver a whole new era of desktop customization. Read the article here, by the CEO of Stardock, Brad Wardell.

André Oppermann has held a presentation on new things and changes in the 5.3-FreeBSD Network Stack at the SUNCON 04 in Zurich yesterday. His very informative summary is available here. The original announcement can be found here.

Forget the new iMacs and iPods. Apple is leaving a lot of dough on the table by not pushing its Mac OSX software aggressively into corporations running Windows. So says Technology Execution Network Corp., a Microsoft solution provider and Apple Authorized Dealer based in Needham, Mass., which says the latest versions of the Unix-based Macintosh OSX operating system code-named "Panther" significantly enhances the ability for the Mac client and server to integrate with Microsoft's Active Directory and Windows server environment.

"The first thing that caught my eye about the Distrowatch announcement on the release of Slax 4.1.4 was that it included KDE 3.3 which had only been out a few weeks. I wanted to try out KDE 3.3 and a live CD like Slax is a great way to do it, so I went over to the Slax website to download the ISO." Read more here.

Mozilla Sunbird is the latest stand-alone application from the Mozilla foundation that follows in the footsteps of now revered browser Firefox and email client Thunderbird. OSDir reviews their first public release, version 0.2.

This article describes the steps of a basic installation of Linux on an IBM eServer BladeCenter JS20 blade server, starting with the BladeCenter Management Module and ending with the installation of SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 8.

Instead of reducing the number of plug-in formats, Mac OS X has added one more to the mix. Furthermore, many Windows-based developers have not found the AU format easy to develop for, and the rollout of AU plug-ins has been slow. Finally, as with other plug-in formats, not all AU plug-ins function equally well in all host applications. Read the article here. Also, make sure you read MacDevCenter, as it contains a number of interesting Mac development articles lately.

"We evaluated the security features of Windows XP SP2 on a test machine, following a clean install of XP Pro with no configuration changes and no third-party software or drivers installed. We installed XP with the NTFS file system, choosing all of the factory defaults, then patched it with each recommended security update including SP-1 (required), before installing SP2." Read the rest at TheRegister.